Helping private tenants achieve financial inclusion

Private tenants are being left behind in progress towards financial inclusion.
Although significant progress has been made since the early 2000s in
increasing access to transactional banking, overall, financially excluded
private tenants – being harder to identify and to reach – have rarely been
targeted with help and support. As a result, the proportion of private tenants
without bank accounts has remained fairly constant, in contrast with declining
numbers of unbanked homeowners and social tenants. Being a private
tenant has become a bigger indicator of the likelihood of an adult living in an
unbanked household than being a social tenant. Heavy targeting of financial
inclusion initiatives towards social tenants, who are easier to reach, has
left private tenants trapped in something of a policy vacuum, and reduced
opportunities for learning about how to reach this group with interventions
and services that might benefit them. This project addresses the ‘policy silence’ around private tenants and
financial inclusion.